Right now, in a television or radio studio somewhere near you, Ed Husain is hunched earnestly before a microphone, ready to reveal to the world, yet again, that the multifarious Islamist groups of which he was once a member are a danger to democracy and should be banned.

This has been a year of lucrative repentances and damascene conversions on a whole bunch of subjects, but especially stuff that is Allah-related. There is good money to be made, it seems, from having been wholly, excruciatingly, wrong about Islam, the war on terror, multiculturalism etc. Husain was once an implacable enemy of us all – and his book, The Islamist (Penguin £8.99), has conferred upon its author the mantle of Kufir’s Favourite Apostate, although he is an apostate merely from ideological Islam, rather than theological Islam. Husain lays into his former friends and colleagues from the “extremist” group Hizb ut Tahrir (HuT), under whose sway he devotedly laboured for a while. He is an extremely naive and gullible man, Husain; show him a speaker with an ounce of charisma and he will be a willing supplicant, for a while, until another even more incandescent monkey comes along, at which point he will swap sides and righteously denounce his erstwhile allies. The Islamist entirely fails to convince me that HuT is a threat to democracy, ghastly though its members may be. It is, nonetheless, “iconic”: it has to be one of the books of the year because the theme of recanting, apologising and then milking it for all its worth on Question Time and beyond was the publishing staple of 2007, and nobody did it more brazenly than Mr Ed.

Elsewhere, we had the fine journalist Andrew Anthony stamping all over his previous political correctness in The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence (Cape £14.99); duh, it seems that the white working classes (from which Anthony springs) have a legitimate gripe when it comes to immigration and what have you. Who’d have thought it? Anthony’s book told a familiar tale of the liberal reaching an age where the term begins to shift its meaning, to twist on its axis – but it was beautifully written and the personal reminiscences were illuminating and even moving.

Meanwhile Nick Cohen, another leftie journalist gone bad-ass right of centre, gave us What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way (HarperPerennial £8.99). By “Liberals” he means himself, again. Cohen’s excellent diatribe was kicked from pillar to post by John Kampfner, his boss at New Statesman, which gave it added kudos. But reading this stuff and forming the notion that it is now politically okay to have a go at Muslims, even – maybe especially – if you are one, I felt myself drifting rapidly back from starboard to port: one should always beware the rise of a new orthodoxy. Just as dangerous as the old orthodoxy.

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The new orthodoxy, with its history of support for the catastrophic war in Iraq, would not much have liked Jeremy Scahill’s bleak and revelatory Blackwater (Serpent’s Tail £12.99), an investigation into the gung-ho, money-grubbing, evangelical Christian security firm whose Ray-Banned, gun-slingin’ operatives are a ubiquitous presence everywhere US foreign policy cheerfully blunders. Still less John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt’s exhaustive and meticulous investigation into the power wielded by the Zionist lobby in Washington, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (Allen Lane £25). Whatever side you are on, America’s unconditional support for Israel has about it the whiff of hypocrisy, no? And – worse – wishful thinking.

At home, meanwhile, we were treated to the self-censored memoirs of that hideous, third-rate, amoral “journalist” Alastair Campbell – Tony Blair’s eminence noire. There should be a prize for anyone who can read The Blair Years (Hutchinson £25), Campbell’s diary of seven years with new Labour without either retching or collapsing into gales of laughter – sometimes at the same moment. The self-righteousness, the self-pity, the moronic obsession with surface rather than substance, the spite and loathing, the utter contempt for democracy – it’s all there. Campbell excised from his account all those things that he thought might damage new Labour; God alone knows, then, what grotesque and appalling tales the man left out. The incredible thing is, he thought that what remained in his ill-written blog would go down just fine and dandy.

A few books from left field, then, that made me sit up for a moment. Christian Wolmar’s Fire and Steam (Atlantic £19.99) was a marvellous account of the part played by the railways in Britain’s recent history. And an American medic, the New Yorker writer Atul Gawande, gave us Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance (Profile £12.99), a rare moment of analysis and introspection from that most clinically aloof of professions. Nicely written, too.

Further afield we had the grim and unrelentingly serious A Russian Diary (Harvill Secker £17.99) from Anna Politkovskaya, the brilliant journalist who was murdered, probably on the orders of Putin (okay, maybe not: so sue me), in Moscow a year ago. Russia’s regression to the mean, after 15 years of hope, was heartbreakingly chronicled. And as a catalogue of adolescent misery as a broken boy soldier in Sierra Leone, beautifully expressed, there was Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (Fourth Estate £14.99).

Given that the world was no less bleak than usual, and maybe perhaps a bit more so, it’s hardly a surprise that the other publishing success of the year was God. Where art thou? Etc. John Humphrys left the door ajar with In God We Doubt: Confessions of a Failed Atheist (Hodder £18.99). If even he feels the tug of religion on his shoulder then we know we are in trouble.

BESTSELLERS

1 The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell
(Hutchinson) 68,635

2 Littlejohn’s Britain by Richard Littlejohn
(Hutchinson) 20,270

3 Yo, Blair! by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
(Politico’s) 5,585

4 The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
(Allen Lane) 4,955

5 Blowing Up Russia by Alexander Litvinenko with Yuri Felshtinsky
(Gibson Square) 4,720

All bestseller lists prepared by The Bookseller using data supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan taken from the TCM 02/01/07-17/11/07

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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